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THE CONCEPT OF DEVELOPMENT AND MAN
Anand Kashyap
Along with the concept of nature and the concept of man, the conception of time was also restructured from the ancient mythic cyclical movement to that of a linear journey or the "march generale" of history. This linear development of man as homo faber has been the crux of all progress ideologies and models of modernity. Modernization and development, in fact, have become synonymous 10 each other constituting of two facets of the same reality of change perceived through linear history, thus creating a schism between tradition and modernity juxta posed in mutual contradictions and as binary opposites of each other. There hardly appears any attempt to synthesize them into some principle of complementarity and mutual harmony. Instead of being a symbiotic dialectic, the twin processes of tradition and modernity, in developing societies like India have become a phenomena of "double alienation."
Before World War II the concept of man as homo faber and as the Cartesian/Baconian master and possessor of nature" had beld immense hopes in the hearts of people for an optimistic future. But since the havoc wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by two primitive atom bombs some serious apprehensions and doubts have been puzzling social thinkers and social scientists, bot only regarding the nature and efficacy of technology but also regarding the very concept of scientific knowledge and its epistemological assumptions. Similarly the Renaissance view of human progress and development is also being looked at sceptically.
In fact since World War II humanity has entered a new phase or "wave" of industria' civilization where the problem is not merely a problem of techno-economic growth or that of ideo-political nanipulation, but one which has been precipitated by another dimension of the same problem in a new form, that is, the accelerating dehumazation of the world manifested in the lurking dangers of nuclear warfare, star wars, national and international terrorism, and the increasing use of scientific discoveries for sophisticated death technology. Dehumanization is also evinced in the general erosion of human values, the growing ecological imbalance tb ough industria.
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